Our food factories aren’t sustainable
December 16th, 2007 by Jim JustMichael Pollen, author of several books on food and our food system including The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, Second Nature, and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, has an article in The New York Times that highlights the vulnerability of our factory-model, monoculture food production system. He focuses on two serious emerging problems.
First is MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS – 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005. For several years we’ve become aware that drug-resistant staph infections are a problem in hospitals. Antibiotics kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes. These hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain called “community-acquired MRSA” is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. This strain may have evolved in concentrated animal feeding operations. But researchers aren’t looking – the last thing we want to find is proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection. That might then require a revolution in the way we produce meat in this country – not something agribusiness or its enablers in government want to see happen.
Pollan next looks at honeybees and Colony Collapse Disorder. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.
Pollan concludes that our industrial agriculture system isn’t sustainable:
“We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up – when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines – the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t ‘sustainable.’”